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IWR6843AOP: How to increase radar sensitivity

Lim
Prodigy 165 points
Part Number: IWR6843AOP

Tool/software:

Hello!

I am developing a sensor to detect people using the IWR6843AOP. The demo uses the area scanner, and the configuration is the default cfg from the radar toolbox.

I want to detect a person moving very slowly at about 6 meters, but with the default cfg, no dynamic points are generated (or only very few points appear occasionally).

I have tried changing the cfarcfg for range and doppler to lower the threshold. While I observed a significant increase in dynamic points (including noise due to the increased signal) at closer distances, there was no significant change in dynamic points for a person moving very slowly at around 6 meters (the number of points slightly increased, but the number of valid dynamic points remained the same).

Besides changing the cfarcfg threshold, are there any other solutions I could try (such as increasing the Rxgain in profilecfg)?

Or is it inherently difficult to detect a person moving very slowly at a distance of 6 meters with the IWR6843AOP?

Please let me know if there are any more effective methods.
Thank you.

  • 0
    TI__Mastermind 20801 points

    Hello, 

    Sorry for the delay here. It should definitely be possible to improve the motion sensitivity of the radar configuration to detect slow moving people at 6m with IWRL6843AOP. As a starting point, please refer to this thread which discusses methods for improving motion sensitivity.

    https://e2e.ti.com/support/sensors-group/sensors/f/sensors-forum/1186367/iwr6843-parameter-tuning-for-motion-sensitivity

    Best Regards,

    Josh

  • 0 in reply to Josh Dye
    Prodigy 165 points 
    Thank you for letting me know.

    As you suggested, I tested it by changing only the cfg with the area scanner demo.
We tried to detect a person moving at a speed of 0.1m/s from a distance of 6m, but it was not detected by the viewer. 
The cfg was set as follows, and only profileCfg, frameCfg, and cfarCfg were changed from the default cfg of the area scanner.

At this time, the maximum detection distance on the mmWaveSensingEstimator was 9.8m, the distance resolution was 0.128m, the maximum detection speed was 4.5m/s, and the speed resolution was 0.094m/s.

Is there anything else I need to change to solve this problem?
     
  • +1 in reply to Lim
    TI__Mastermind 20801 points

    Hi,

    If the person is moving at a speed of 0.1m/s and the velocity resolution is only 0.094m/s then some of the detections are probably getting considered as static and are being removed if clutter removal is enabled. So one more thing you could try would be to disable clutter removal ( clutterRemoval -1 0 ) in the configuration. Other than that I would try to further improve the velocity resolution if possible. Also just to clarify, I know the thread that I linked says "increase the velocity resolution" but that really just means "better" velocity resolution which is actually decreasing the number reported in sensing estimator. 

    Also I want to take a step back and ask if you could share more details of your application? And what is the reason that you chose the area scanner demo as a starting point? As mentioned in the linked thread, the People Tracking demo performs but better at detecting smaller motions due to algorithm differences. Have you evaluated the people tracking demo?

    Best Regards,

    Josh